Commentary on Scott McCloud's Making Comics

McCloud's books Understanding Comics and Making Comics are both creative and educational masterworks. He reinforces the ideas of the comic artist's toolkit through visual explanations and examples so they are easier to digest, using the very art form that he's describing in order to show how to make compelling comics by example.

One concept from Making Comics that stood out to me in particular is the nature of comics being a soundless medium and the ways we try to accommodate for that loss of dimension. Something that has always appealed to me about comics and animation is how expressive they are. There's something very compelling about watching a character's emotional state change from panel to panel, frame to frame, shot to shot, in a medium that is fully constructed by hand and thus fully intentional. No movement is without meaning. It makes an incredible amount of sense that comics actually need to be extra expressive in order to engage the reader and increase the clarity of the scene-- unlike real life, comics lack other tiny cues we pick up on like movement and noise in order to decode the emotions of others.

While reading Chapter 2's explanation of how and why to make characters extra emotive in comics, it occurred to me that this may be a part of why comics are often considered childish or 'campy'. In order to capture and maintain the attention of a consumer viewing countless products, extremely dynamic poses and compositions are often necessary to draw them in. Over-the-top emotions, colors, and character designs can enhance this sense of drama. In a culture that looks down on excessive displays of feeling as being immature, it's not surprising that comics are still widely considered to just be light fare for kids. Hopefully this viewpoint will change, whether through the creation of more emotionally subtle 'adult' graphic novels or through increasing acceptance of open and honest expression.